Archive for the fiduciary Category

As banks continue to lend less to the small businesses and entrepreneurs of the UK more alternative finance providers are springing up, be that venture capital, crowd sourcing or the exceptional growth of the online ICO or Initial Coin Offerings of the “blockchain” or crypto-currency sector.

I love this “disinter-mediation” of the usual banks and government bodies and so wanted to share several new financiers with any reader, one a leading Commercial finance provider with a deep pool of investors looking for a reasonable return for funding UK businesses and the other a consultancy specialising in the facilitation and promotion of online ICO fundraising for growing fin tech companies.

Block-Chain.me: A great website backed by a very capable and experienced team, which also serves as a good introduction to the entire Blockchain, Initial Coin Offering, Crypto-currency and the growing economy of the “Internet of Things” (IOT) .

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Hive Financial Hive Financial is a highly experienced commercial finance broker specialising in Commercial, Residential, Bridging and Development Finance,dedicated to giving time and excellence to each case. “There is no one size fits all. Our loyalty is with you, Hive Financial have no ties to any particular lender” – Steven Drake: director.

Police officers protect a Starbucks outlet in Oxford Street during the TUC anti-austerity protest in London on 20 October 2012. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

‘Only the little people pay taxes,” the late American corporate tax evader Leona Helmsley famously declared. That’s certainly the spirit of David Cameron and George Osborne’s Britain. Five years into the crisis, the British economy has just edged out of its third downturn, but construction is still reeling from government cuts and most people’s living standards are falling.

Those at the sharp end are being hit hardest: from cuts to disability and housing benefits, tax credits and the educational maintenance allowance and now increases in council tax while NHS waiting lists are lengthening, food banks are mushrooming across the country and charities report sharp increases in the number of children going hungry. All this to pay for the collapse in corporate investment and tax revenues triggered by the greatest crash since the 30s.

Not that many of them pay anything like that, even now. The scale of tax avoidance by high-street brand multinationals has now become clear, in no small part thanks to campaigning groups such as UK Uncut. Asda, Google, Apple, eBay, Ikea, Starbucks, Vodafone: all pay minimal tax on massive UK revenues, mostly by diverting profits earned in Britain to their parent companies, or lower tax jurisdictions via royalty and service payments or transfer pricing.

Four US companies – Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks – have paid just £30m tax on sales of £3.1bn over the last four years, according to a Guardian analysis. Apple is estimated to have avoided over £550m in tax on more than £2bn worth of underlying profits in Britain by channelling business through Ireland, according to a Sunday Times analysis, while Starbucks has paid no corporation tax in Britain for the last three years.

The Tory MP and tax lawyer Charlie Elphicke estimates 19 US-owned multinationals are paying an effective tax rate of 3% on British profits, instead of the standard rate of 26%. It’s all entirely legal, of course. But taken together with the multiple individual tax scams of the elite, this roll call of corporate infamy has become an intolerable scandal, when taxes are rising and jobs, benefits and pay being cut for the majority.

Not only that, but collecting the taxes that these companies have wriggled out of would go a long way to shrinking the deficit for which working- and middle-class Britain’s living standards are being sacrificed. The total tax gap between what’s owed and collected has been estimated by Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK at £120bn a year: £25bn in legal tax avoidance, £70bn in fraudulent tax evasion and £25bn in late payments.

Revenue and Customs’ own last guess of £35bn has been widely recognised as a serious underestimate. But even allowing for the fact that it would never be possible to close the entire gap, those figures give a sense of what resources could be mobilised with a determined crackdown. Set them, for instance, against the £83bn in cuts planned for this parliament (including £18bn in welfare) – or the £1.2bn estimated annual benefit fraud bill – and you get a sense of what’s at stake.

Cameron and Osborne wring their hands at the “moral repugnance” of “aggressive avoidance”, but are doing nothing serious about it whatever. They’ve been toying with a general “anti-abuse” principle. But it would only catch a handful of the kind of personal dodges the comedian Jimmy Carr signed up to, not the massive profit-shuffling corporate giants have been dining off.

It’s not as if there aren’t any number of measures that would plug the loopholes and slash tax avoidance and evasion. They include a general anti-avoidance principle (of the kind the Labour MP Michael Meacher has been pushing in a private member’s bill) that would outlaw any transaction whose primary purpose was avoidance rather than economic; minimum tax (backed even by the Conservative Elphicke); and country-by-country financial reporting, and unitary taxation, to expose transfer pricing and limit profit-siphoning.

But when austerity and cuts are sucking demand out of the economy, fuelling poverty and joblessness and actually widening the deficit, the need to step up the pressure for corporations and the wealthy to pay their share as part of a wider recovery strategy couldn’t be more obvious.

The target has to shift from “welfare scroungers” to tax dodgers, and the campaign go national. Companies that are milking the country at the expense of the majority are especially vulnerable to brand damage. Forcing them to pay up is a matter of both social justice and economic necessity.

Records of taxpayers’ emails, text messages and phone calls, as well as websites they have visited, are increasingly being examined covertly by HMRC investigators. Data obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) shows that HMRC inspectors obtained 14,000 records of taxpayers’ communications data in 2011 ‒ up from 11,500
in 2010. The records concerned show, for example, the date, time, sender and recipient of an email or phone message, or the date, time and address of a website visited.

The information can be obtained under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which allows HMRC to authorise its own surveillance requests. It does not have to have suspicions of criminal activity and no warrant is needed.

The actual content of emails and phone messages are not available directly through RIPA requests, but can be obtained by a later request if the communications data raises suspicion of wrongdoing. HMRC did not disclose how many full interception warrants it has obtained.

HMRC can also self-authorise directed surveillance operations under which a taxpayer can be followed in public places. Its response to the FOIA request showed that this type of surveillance has
declined slightly as electronic interceptions have been favoured instead. HMRC refused to reveal the number of successful prosecutions for tax evasion resulting from RIPA surveillance. But it says its use of the RIPA to obtain communications data is ‘proportionate and lawful’ and in 2011 enabled the agency to protect GBP850 million of tax revenue.

The recently released files on the events at the Hillsborough sports stadium 23 years ago clearly show how the UK government, police and Murdoch owned press could so effectively and professionally cover up the cause of the deaths of 96 innocent people. While at the same time they apportioned the blame in the public mind on the dead fans friends and families. This is also the exact reason why it has taken so long for the truth to come out.

(Stop now:: try to put yourself in that position: your son, daughter or friend is crushed to death in front of you and you are blamed for this tragedy by the police and the media and nearly everyone believes it to be true)

Now that the majority of us have mobile devices with cameras and internet, facebook, youtube etc, it would now be much harder. to sell a similar cover up so fully nationwide.

So I am not surprised that now as this type of cover up is no longer an option to a current or future government and most of the people responsible are now retired or gone, the UK government has decided to own up,whilst also trying to win plaudits for their openness.

It should make us all question more…..

And to all the Apologists Mackenzie, Johnson and also every MP since Thatcher who has had access to and could have released these documents – TOO LATE!
Forced empty apologies mean nothing.

A £38bn development boom in London’s most expensive neighbourhoods has been spurred by rampant demand from European and Asian buyers seeking safe investments away from turbulent Eurozone economies.

The pipeline of upmarket housing projects in planning or already under construction in the UK capital has increased more than two-thirds during the past year, with 15,500 units slated for delivery by 2021, even as building work in other parts of the country remains stagnant.

That’s one version of the story. The Guardian offers another (in a compelling story that deserves to be read in full). They report:

Britain has allowed key members of Egypt’s toppled dictatorship to retain millions of pounds of suspected property and business assets in the UK, potentially violating a globally-agreed set of sanctions.

The situation has led to accusations that ministers are more interested in preserving the City of London’s cosy relationship with the Arab financial sector than in securing justice.

I and the Tax Justice Network have long argued there is an economy within an economy n the UK – which is that of tax haven UK. Boith these reports are clear signs of this.

Of course money floods to the UK – but that is because our domicile rule makes the UK a perfect tax haven. But these people who come do not add value: they simply distort our housing markets, destroy the balance in our society, encourage more financial services which imbalance our economy and have no role to play in our democratic and other processes. It’s worse than that though: as the second report shows, far too much of this money is illicit and the UK has a willingness to turn a blind eye to such funding that is reflected in the behaviour of our banks who all to knowingly it seems do just the same thing.

This is tax haven UK at work, like a cancer within our country, destroying it from within